Search icon

Movies & TV

15th Dec 2018

WATCH: Harry Potter star Evanna Lynch spoke incredibly bravely while discussing her eating disorder

Rudi Kinsella

Evanna Lynch

An extremely brave thing to talk about on national television.

Irish actress Evanna Lynch appeared on The Late Late Show on Friday night.

Most recently, Lynch was competing in Dancing with the Stars in America, and she excelled in getting to the final.

She discussed this on The Late Late, as well as her time playing Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films.

The Louth woman’s story is an extremely interesting one. She was a massive fan of the Harry Potter books, to the point that she wrote a letter to J.K Rowling to thank her for creating a world in which she could escape from an eating disorder that she was battling at the time.

She wrote this letter at 11-years-old, not knowing that five years later she would be a star of the franchise.

She described her eating disorder as a “retreat from life”, and said that it took all of her energy, resulting in her losing all of her friends.

Speaking about reading the Harry Potter books, she said: “I don’t like to make it to sweet, and people think ‘Oh, you found this and you recovered’, but it was definitely the escape for me.

“That’s what I wrote to J.K Rowling, I said: ‘You don’t understand what a big deal it is to me that there’s one thing in the world that can take my mind off this obsession and this illness – and that’s Harry Potter.”

Have a look at the clip below:

Clip via The Late Late Show